So just how evil is DRM?

If you would like me to send you an invite to emusic, for a 50 track free trial, please send me your email...


First off, I'm not at all interested in pirating music in she sense of copying a CD and giving it away or selling it. I'm quite happy to contribute to the efforts which produce the music, not least so that people can continue to afford to make music.

What I do object to is being asked to pay for low quality products which have limited use. If I were to buy a track from Itunes, I'd be able to play it on a PC, or generate a fairly low quality audio CD - but if I wanted to play it on a portable player, I'd need to buy an iPod. Just think about this for a minute... As soon as you've made a substantial investmant in buying 'music' from itunes, and you break your existing player - you might need to pay more to replace it with a new model which still plays all that old music

Napster - music rental

At lease napster are honset about telling you that you are only renting music from them

Try Music before you buy. Click for FREE Napster Trial.
Download Shed-loads of Tracks on Napster

emusic.com


Audio LunchBox

Similar to emusic, but they gave me an affiliate link, so they get more test... I've not signed up and tried this, but they offer unencrypted mp3s, which you buy permanant rights to use.

Download unrestricted mp3s for as little as 20 cents each from Audio Lunchbox! Choose from over 500,000 songs!

The other benefit, is that being US based, we can buy music at US prices


Article in The Inquirer about DRM

Who does DRM protect? The customers, the artists or the record companies and the hardware vendors?

Home Copyright Sean Houlihane, 2006 Last modified: Fri Feb 17 11:27:05 GMT Standard Time 2006